Resolutions

(Brené Brown, Rising Strong, p. 5)
“Resolutions are meant for those who have resolved not to adventure into the light.

Forgive yourself for this year, for all of your transgressions and seeming failures. Because you are alive, they are all miracles for you.

Part of you is better for it, and “all of you” is lovelier still, even for what you “thought” you failed…even for those you felt you assailed…

These experiences have made you more whole, and not less, as you wonder endlessly about who you are.

Because ‘Who You Are’ is miraculous, especially the adventuresome wanderer who gets caught in the fray, feeling lost and forbidden and alone.

You are still here, another year older, another moment more beautiful and aged, and yet more youthful than ever before.

This year you also sailed brilliantly along the curves, don’t you recall?


You sang songs you did not even know upon life’s wandering voyage, and the intricate memories of a life well traveled. You were brilliant not only once or twice, but many more.

Be still instead, in this wintry glow that subsides, if only for a moment now.

No resolutions should bask, for a life bursting with more life, for a world of bewilderment and moments left unsaid and more cherished, your time is all worth knowing.

For all of the years forward, live them wildly.

Oh passion-filled days, all steadfast and young, know that the next year will surpass all others, because it is new, and because it will be filled with moments that will remain unspoken of harsh and light, right along with your steady heart.
We can give ourselves a gift this year: to live the life of wonder.

Stare silently into the sky and wish for nothing but everything imaginable, everything we could not possibly imagine or see.

Forgive wishes and proclamations of this past year and may you want only to bask in the glow of “not knowing.”

And in the sheer madness of all that is both impossible and possible—because we are willing to close our eyes in abandonment and joy, if only for a sunrise or sunset of innocence and breadth.

When we allow ourselves the sweetness of now, we may have all of the adventures that life has to offer in the coming year."“Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back. We can rise up from our failures, screwups, and falls, but we can never go back to where we stood before we were brave or before we fell. Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being…During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there’s nowhere to go back to… Straddling the tension that lies between wanting to go back to the moment before we risked and fell and being pulled forward to even greater courage is an inescapable part of rising strong.”